The invention relates generally to disc players, and more particularly to disc players upgradeable to play new content types.
Optical discs have been widely used to store various types of media, such as audio, data, video, images, animations, etc., which may be encoded in various formats. For example, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, and H26.L are used for video, MP3 and SACD for audio, and Flash and SVG for animation. A conventional player typically contains a fixed number of decoders that support only a subset of the content types. As a new content type is introduced in the market, consumers would have to buy new players with decoders that support the new content type in order to play discs with this new format. This is very costly for consumers. They will have to make a difficult decision of whether to purchase the new player now and only to see that it will become obsolete in a matter of a few years or not to buy discs with the new format. If the majority of the consumers decide not to buy discs with the new format, it would severely hinder the acceptance of the new format and thus significantly affect the development of the new optical storage technology.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a player that not only can play existing content types, but also may be upgradeable to play new content types.